question Re: Solr Swap Memory exceeding threshold in Support Questions

Solr Swap Memory exceeding threshold

AzfarB — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:59:02 GMT

Hi Everyone!

I've been receiving the following error on my Cloudera Manager.

"603.1 MiB of swap memory is being used by this role's process. Warning threshold: 200.0 MiB."

I have tried removing Solr collections by going to the following location and running the following query.

http://<HOSTNAME>:8993/solr/#/ranger_audits/documents
<delete><query>evtTime:[* TO NOW-0DAYS]</query></delete>

But it's not having any effect on the Swap memory usage.

P.S. Swappiness is set to 1 as when I run

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The output generated is 1.

Cluster Details :

Solr: 8.4.1

Hadoop 3.1.1.7.1.6.0-297

CDH-7.1.6

Re: Solr Swap Memory exceeding threshold

araujo — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 10:25:26 GMT

@AzfarB ,

Which other roles are running on the same node as this Solr role?

Could you provide the output of a "sar -r 5 12" command?

Cheers,

André

Re: Solr Swap Memory exceeding threshold

AzfarB — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 13:25:30 GMT

Hi @araujo,

The problem went away as soon as I restarted Solr, but I'd still like to understand what it was and if there's a better/permanent solution.

Please find below the output of your mentioned command "sar -r 5 12"

This is the master node and there are quite a number of roles currently running here. Please find their list below.

HBASE Gateway
HIVE Gateway
HDFS Gateway
HIVE on TEZ Gateway
Hue Server
Kafka Gateway
Oozie Server
Ranger Admin
Ranger Tagsync
Ranger Usersync
Solr Server
Spark Gateway
SQOOP_Client Gateway
Streams Messaging Manager Rest Admin Server
Streams Messaging Manager UI Server
Tez Gateway
YARN Gateway

Re: Solr Swap Memory exceeding threshold

ram76 — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 17:03:00 GMT

Hi @AzfarB

I think it is quite common for modern linux kernel to move some inactive pages into swap to bring down memory footprint.

As long your application or Solr not having any performance issue, I would not concern much on the swapping and I would just increase the threshold.

rgds,

Ram.

Re: Solr Swap Memory exceeding threshold

VidyaSargur — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 05:56:50 GMT

@AzfarB, Has any of the replies helped resolve your issue? If so, can you please mark the appropriate reply as the solution? It will make it easier for others to find the answer in the future.

Re: Solr Swap Memory exceeding threshold

smdas — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:56 GMT

Hello @AzfarB

Thanks for using Cloudera Community. Based on the Post, Your Team observed Solr-Infra JVM reporting WARNING for Swap Space more than 200MB being utilised. Restarting the Solr-Infra JVM ensured the WARNING went away.

Note that Swapping isn't Bad in general & the same has been discussed in detail by Community in [1] & [2]. Plus, Deleting RangerAudits Documents won't affect the same as Solr uses JVM as documented [3]. Indexed Documents aren't persisted in Memory unless Cached, thereby ensuring Deletion won't fix the Swapping guaranteed.

As your Screenshot shows, the Host itself is running short on Memory (~99% Utilised) & Overall Swap is ~80% at ~47GB, out of which Solr-Infra is contributing <1GB. As documented in the below Links, Your Team can focus on the Host Level Usage & Considering Increasing the Swap Threshold from 200MB to at least 10% of the Heap i.e. 2GB for a Warning.

01 additional point can be made as to why Solr-Infra Restart helped resolved the WARNING. This needs to be looked at from the Host perspective as to the amount of Memory freed & Whether the Overall Swap Usage reduced at Host Level after Solr-Infra Restart as opposed to Solr-Infra WARNING being suppressed only.

Regards, Smarak

[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2658/why-use-swap-when-there-is-more-than-enough-free-space-in-ram

[2] https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

[3] https://blog.cloudera.com/apache-solr-memory-tuning-for-production/

Re: Solr Swap Memory exceeding threshold

smdas — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 07:17:24 GMT

Hello @AzfarB

We hope the above Post has helped answer your concerns & offered an Action Plan to further review. We are marking the Post as Resolved for now. For any concerns, Feel free to post your ask in a Post & we shall get back to you accordingly.

Regards, Smarak